Sanity returns: Bee collapse linked to fungus

Even if all four of the Nobel Intent writers were writing full time, science would continue to produce far more interesting and important results than we'd be capable of reporting. As a result, we probably put as much effort into rejecting stories as we do into picking the ones we ultimately report on. One story that didn't make the cut was the claim that cell phones have been killing honeybees, causing Sudden Colony Collapse (SCC) and putting agriculture at risk of losing its primary source of pollinators.

A number of things didn't smell right about that story, among them the facts that cell phone signals are extremely low power, not likely to be concentrated in major agricultural areas, and not likely to operate on any sort of frequency that bees use for navigation. We weren't the only ones that felt that way: Spiegel Onlinelooked into the study that the claims were based on, and found a number of reasons that its findings wouldn't actually make sense out of SCC.

Fortunately, the availability of a bad explanation rarely stops scientists from looking for a good one—it may even encourage them. UCSF has announced that some of its scientists may be on the trail of a far more likely explanation for SCC: parasitic fungal infections. The researchers obtained samples of dead bees from the US Army researchers (oddly, the bees were collected in California and sent to an Army research center in Maryland before being sent back out to UCSF), and started hunting for parasite DNA.

One method they used involved a DNA chip containing small fragments of sequence from a large number of viruses. They found that the bee samples contained many DNA fragments that matched a sequence from Iflavirus, which is known to have infected bees in the past. But they didn't stop searching there; reasoning that the SCC must involve a new infectious agent, they checked for sequences from a fungus that was known to have jumped from Asian bee species to the Western honeybee in recent years. Not only was it present but, in some samples, fungal sequences were more common than bee sequences.

This provides a couple of reasonable suspects for SCC, and the researchers involved note that the real proof will involve going out and checking many more dead bees to make sure that these parasites are well associated with the problem. In the mean time, those of us with cell phones can dial without guilt.